In high-speed networking, data throughput and low latency are key objectives for system designers. Oftentimes, networking equipment, such as switches, routers, and other node devices, are pushed to their physical limit to attain networking performance goals. As a consequence, certain links may become prone to errors. Errors may be managed using data-encoding techniques such as forward error correction, for example, where a receiving node or intermediate-hop node detects and, sometimes even corrects, errors in received data. Errors that cannot be corrected generally result in a negative acknowledgement (NACK) reported to the sending node, which responds by retransmitting the packet. Retransmissions tend to reduce data throughput, increase latency, and contribute to congestion at affected portions of the network.
Conventionally, networks manage congestion by dropping packets, or otherwise calling for, or creating conditions in which, packets are re-routed using other available paths that are less congested. One challenge with this type of approach is that, by the time a link is deemed congested, there has already been some period of time during which the data-throughput performance of the network suffered a reduced level of data-throughput performance.